


Silent and Sure

by melannen



Series: Les Mis Crossovers That Should Not Be [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Crossover, Guide Valjean, Madeleine Era, Other, Sentinel Javert, Soul Bond, soulbonds passing in the night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 20:04:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/840835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Javert is a Sentinel, Silent and Sure.</p><p>Combeferre is a Guide.</p><p>Too bad nobody in France remembers what that means.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silent and Sure

**Author's Note:**

> Part one of the series of 'les mis crossovers that should not be', reposted from DW. This one is especially special because when I wrote it my knowledge of both Les Mis and Sentinel was 100% fanon-based.

Every morning before dawn, Inspector Javert woke in his room in the town of Montreuil-sur-Mer. It was a plain room, severely so, beyond what his poverty might excuse - all of the few furnishings simple in shape and texture, the colors limited to dull greys and browns; the only concession to comfort was the fine linen of his bedding.

He lit a single candle, by the dim light of which he washed carefully in lukewarm water, dressed in his aged clothes and boots, tidy but worn now to a delicate softness, and shaped by time to the exact contours of his body; breakfasted on a tasteless, textureless, room-temperature porridge; and stepped out onto the streets of the town to begin a day's work enforcing the peace.

Javert kept every day to this strict routine, so that one could predict, at any moment, where he might be and what he would be doing. One might think that such clockwork regularity would be difficult for a man with such a fundamentally chaotic profession, but Javert had an uncanny manner of simply arranging matters so that he would appear where he was needed, and for events to work out around him with such precision that he might have foretold them.

It was not foretelling, no more that his mother's had been; merely observation, well-honed and long-practiced. From the street he could hear the unwonted silence in a third-floor room, and know that in the evening the man of the household would be drunk and angry and violent. He could smell the slurry in an alley and know that the baby in the garret was ill again, and its mother would be walking the streets to earn money for medicines. He could see a young pick-pocket plying his trade six blocks down the street, and track his twisting escape through the town merely by the sound of his foot-falls, to suddenly appear before him, just when he thought himself free. He could tell from the smell of the powder and the sound of the hammer that a gun would misfire on the next shot. He could feel the temper of the town through the thin soles of his boots.

Every morning at the same time, he would pass by the mayor on his way to his business; they would offer polite greetings to one another as they passed, and Javert would hear Monsieur le Maire's heartbeat speed suddenly, though he remained outwardly serene. Perhaps Javert's heartbeat sped as well, but he could not hear it over the sound of the other's. This sound stayed with him throughout the day: whenever he began to lose himself, in the smells of the rookeries, the noise of the factories, the tumultuous motion and riotous color of a town, he had only to listen to that heartbeat, as steady and calm and ever-present as the stars in the darkness, and be brought back to himself and his purpose.

He did not think, 'No normal man could discern one heartbeat alone among those of all the people in this town, no matter the distance, no matter the distractions.' He did not think, 'Were it not for Monsieur Madeleine, and the focus he gives me, I could not fulfill my duties here: I would be ill and dreaming in my rooms, as I was before I was posted here to Montreuil-sur-mer for the quiet and the sea air.' He did not think these things, for of course, none of them were true.

Instead, he thought, 'I have heard that same heartbeat before, the strength and power of it churning through those veins; I heard it in Toulon, running through my sleep and my waking; for years in my youth I thought it was the sound of the sea, until a certain convict was paroled, and he took my peace with him as he took his undeserved freedom when he ran. There cannot be two men with that heartbeat. But M. Madeleine cannot be that brutish creature, for there is nothing else they share; and yet he must be. I have no proof; no court will take the sound of a heartbeat as proof. And so I must remain vigilant; I must stay near him, in the service of justice; whenever I feel myself wavering, I must turn all of my senses to him, and be steadfast again.'

M. Madeleine did not think any of these things, for he was in some ways a much simpler soul. He thought only that each morning, as he greeted the Inspector, the one man who might denounce him and be believed, that despite the rush of old fear he felt at his presence, he felt also that he was safe with this man: that so long as Inspector Javert kept watch upon his town, so long as each morning they passed each other in the street and spoke their polite hellos, so long as there was one man who knew his soul in all its parts and that man was Javert, then all would be well with them.

(Some decades in the future, in distant Paris, a young man by the name of Combeferre would begin studying under the eminent natural historian Maturin, compiling newly-rediscovered myths of the savages of Asia and America and the dark continent, finding to match it half-forgotten folklore of his own people, and begin to understand, and experiment with, certain paths of knowledge that had been long forgotten in the civilized West, and guide a dear friend of his down them to a greater destiny: but for Javert and Valjean, such knowledge was too late and too little. They had only a greeting in the street, and a heartbeat in the night, to go on with.)


End file.
